As it goes… I prefer not to talk on the phone as there were one too many times when I was younger that my mom handed me the phone while she was talking with some dear, distant relative. I had little interest in talking to the person on the other end but still my mother insisted I take the handset and carry on a conversation like I knew who Uncle Leroy and Aunt Loretta were.

“A facehugger is the second stage in the Alien’s life cycle. It has eight long, finger-like legs, which allow it to crawl rapidly, and a long tail adapted for making great leaps. These particular appendages give it an appearance somewhat comparable to chelicerate arthropods such as arachnids and horseshoe crabs.

The facehugger is a parasitoid; its only purpose is to make contact with the host’s mouth for the implantation process, by gripping its legs around the victim’s head and wrapping its tail around the host’s neck. Upon making contact, the facehugger administers a cynose-based paralytic in order to render it unconscious and immobile. During a successful attachment, the facehugger will insert a proboscis down the host’s throat, while simultaneously implanting an embryo. The host is kept alive, and the creature breathes for the host. Attempts to remove facehuggers generally prove fatal, as the parasitoid will respond by tightening its tail around the host’s neck, and its acidic blood prevents it from being cut away. In addition, its grip on the host’s head is strong enough to tear the host’s face off if it is forcibly removed.”

It took Ridley Scott 35 years, but the sci-fi filmmaking legend finally got to make his version of Aliens. All it took to get there was a decades-long dwindling of the series, a kind-of-but-not-exactly reboot in the form of 2012’s Prometheus, and a five-year cloud of confusion for series fans. Maybe that was Scott’s game plan all along!

At any rate, now we have Alien Covenant, and it’s probably as much of a James Cameron-styled film as we may ever get out of Scott. But that makes Covenant sound more accessible than it really is. If you’re a longtime series fan and have grown into either an apologist or a hater, you’re going to love this sequel’s adherence to Alien film lore, its zillions of answers, and its return to terror sequences chock full of gooey, murderous xenomorphs.

If you’re just looking for some solid sci-fi, on the other hand, you may find yourself adrift. This movie is only going to work if you at least have a clue about what happened in Prometheus—even though Alien Covenant is a completely different kind of film.